Manuals Important to Company Credibility
A poorly written manual can harm your reputation
Manuals are important technical documents that often contain needed safety, health, operational, and/or maintenance instructions for a product. But if poorly written, manuals can reflect badly on the manual developer. A poorly written manual can undo or undermine the positive benefits derived from pr, advertising, and marketing communications.
The English version of an air purifier manual enclosed with the Natural Air Purifier from WBM International has numerous errors that seemed avoidable with a “spell-check” or a proofreading from a good editor.
One sentence in this manual reads “BREATH GENTLY, CONCENTRATE BETTERM RELAX, AND ENJOY TOTAL BODY HARMONY.”
An editor should have caught the spelling mistake and other mistakes we found in the manual. We see that some subheads have periods after the subheads, and some don’t. The list of locations, which describes WHERE to use the air purifier’s salt crystals, reads “What to use Salt Crystal.”
After reading the manual, and seeing all the mistakes, we started to question the safety of the air purifier product. If the manufacturer didn’t care if the manual was full of mistakes, could mistakes also have been made in the assembly and manufacturing of the air purifier, which has an electric cord that plugs into my wall? Could we trust that WBM’s process of manufacturing the air purifier was any better or more reliable than the process they used for making their manuals? We sure hope so, but the manual raises doubts.
The manual does reference a Quality system, but the type size is so small it can’t be read. This is not a typographical or grammatical mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. If the type is too small to read, the intended message never makes it into the reader’s brain.
Below is a brief list of manuals guidelines. Contact editor@techcontenteditors.com to help add to the list.
Manual Guidelines
-Use spellcheck on your computer before publishing a manual.
-Have your manual proofread by technical people as well as people familiar with appropriate rules of grammar.
-Put a document number on your manual and keep a list of revisions or changes to the manual.
-Using pictures in your manual helps convey information in spite of language barriers.
-When using pictures, images, tables, and other graphics, be sure to label them. Providing captions for graphics is also a good practice.
-Break your manual down into sections.
-Long manuals with many sections should have a Table of Contents.
-Some manuals may require an index of the manual contents, including graphics.
-Understand the needs of the manual’s readers before defining the manuals contents and organizing sections.
